Free Locked Rooms by Laurie R. King

would have to be enough. Leaving the leather chair uncovered, I absently adjusted a crooked painting and pushed a couple of misplaced spines back into place as I went out of the library on my way upstairs.
    Holmes was nowhere to be seen, but I heard a movement from further overhead: the attic. I stood in the door of my parents’ room, looking in warily, not certain if I was ready for the intimacy of a married couple’s bedroom. However, the room did not feel particularly private, not with the afternoon sun streaming in through the south window where Holmes had drawn back the curtains. The dust of his passing still hung in the sunlight, muffling the rainbows cast by the prismed glass of the window onto the white cloths covering the dressing-table. He had also left a trail of footprints on the boards, coming and going and, by the looks of it, circling into various corners as he searched for anything out of the ordinary. Two white-painted wicker chairs sat in the bay window to my left, arranged on either side of a small, high table just large enough for a cup-laden tray. I had a vivid picture of the two occupants sitting in the morning sunlight, sharing their coffee at the start of the day; again, was it memory, or imagination?
    I moved across to the lumpy dressing-table, cautiously raising its protective cloth to reveal hair-brush, powder, manicure implements, crystal scent bottle. My hand hovered above the delicate glass stopper of this last, pulled by the powerful memory stimulus the aroma might hold, held back by the fear that it might be more than I could endure. Either that, or nothing at all, which would be even more unbearable. Instead, my hand came down on the long red lacquer-ware box beside it, tipping open the top to reveal a collection of hair- and hat-pins and the single carved ivory chop-stick that she had used to tease loose portions of hair. It was a lovely thing, and I ran my thumb across the worn carvings before I closed the top of the box and withdrew my hand.
    Tomorrow, perhaps, I would envelop myself in my mother’s scent. Or the next day.
    Instead of the bottle, my hand reached out for a picture, one of half a dozen tarnished silver frames lying face-down on the table’s linen cloth. The one I lifted first was the largest, and showed my brother and me when Levi was on the cusp of walking—perhaps a year old, which would have made me six. But instead of the usual studio setting of curly-headed children before a painted rose bower or atop a bored Shetland pony, we were dressed in elaborately formal Chinese costumes, high-necked, glossy as only silk could be, the frogs of the front fastenings intricately worked. My brother and I stood before some kind of shelved cabinet, ornately carved although out of focus, and although he looked merely bewildered, my expression indicated that I appreciated the joke; I could see why my mother had chosen the photograph for her dressing-table.
    I ran my thumb over the blackened frame, thinking it looked familiar. Slowly, it came to me: I had this one’s twin at home, in Sussex, lying (also face-down) in a drawer under some meaningless papers; rarely glimpsed, never forgotten. My own photograph showed the entire family, not just its younger generation, but as I studied the arrangement of pictures on my mother’s dressing-table, I began to suspect that mine had once balanced the other frame on this surface. I could even see where it had once stood, in the large empty space on the right-hand side of the table. Whoever had packed the trunk of clothing and effects that accompanied me on the boat to England in 1915 had come in here and removed the portrait from my mother’s collection, that I might take something of them with me.
    I placed the picture back upright on the cloth, and one by one, set the others upright as well. My father appeared, stretched out on a travelling-rug laid across a very English-looking stretch of pebbly beach, eyes closed behind his spectacles, the